Yeah, there are days when I think that the Live Search algo is just a random number generator. The company I work for has consistently ranked on the first page in Google and Yahoo, but we're always up and down on MSN. Last week we were at #36. Get to the office yesterday, and we're #1. Now that we're #1 though, we might start trying to figure out how to optimize for MSN. Getting results (even when they're unintended) is always a great incentive.

I agree....i hear all the hype MSN Search will be the biggest SE when Vista starts hitting homes, but i just dont see that happening. google has been in command for far too long, and people stick to what they like....

oh...and in comparison..over 700 clicks on my google PPC last month...2 from MSN....you can plainly see that no one uses it to search nearly as much as G and Yahoo.

I see that MSN sucks. There is no traffic from that SE. We are in one of the highly competitive industry and we get no traffic, absolutly no traffic from MSN or from adcenter. Our site ranks #1 for good keyword but the traffic we get it Zero. MSN algo from what I have seen considers the following Domain Name Relevance Number of page in a site Number of links. It has nothing to do with the quality of a site or its links

Used to, but there is method to the madness there anymore in terms of what is really going on. Any given site can move from 20th page to first page within weeks because of the constant reshuffling. Like trying to ask a girl in grade 4 what her favorite band of the day is.

When you remove all SEO and focus all on user end, you get dropped to page 20. When you get more links, you seem to get penalized in some fashion.

I dont focus on traffic from MSN anymore, and would agree that things have gone downhill since the Update in August.

Thought this might be of interest:...from another thread I posted today: After August 06 update: After much testing, I lowered KW density...all my pages are back up and ranking well on MSN. *Here is what I found...use KW no more that 2 times in Description Meta Tags. *Keep overall page density under 3%.

DON'T over optimize Meta Tags or Page Body... choose 3 or 4 KW's in your Description and use no more than 2 times...all others 1 time. Use the same KW's for page body and keep in the 3% range. All other page body KW's keep at 1% to 2%.

Yahoo also seems to like this density...traffic has increased. Google is not a big traffic generator for us yet, so I can't say. If Google is your main SE with plenty of traffic, I wouldn't touch a thing, however if MSN and Yahoo are your main SE's...the above worked well for us. Hope this helps. Fish Texas

I have never paid any attention to MSN and have always concentrated on Google. For the 8 key search arguements that I check from time to time MSN puts me at number 1 while I have always been happy with twos and threes from Google.